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Colin McDowell's fashion moment: Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel was born in 1883, yet her radical approach to fashion is as current today as it was when she died in 1971. The American fashion guru Diana Vreeland claimed that Chanel had “invented the 20th century for women”. This may not be entirely true, but her rethinking of how women should live and dress was, in its own way, as revolutionary as Pablo Picasso’s reinvention of the way we look at the world. Unlike him, however, she communicated her message directly.

And what was the message? To cast off the chains, to think and dress with the assurance of men and to take no nonsense from male couturiers who wanted to turn women into icons or fantasy beings. For Chanel, the idea of a woman dressing to fulfil the fantasies of men was like a red rag to a bull, which is why, with the exception of Balenciaga,